September 30–October 7, 1999

fringe

Fringe Shorts

The third annual Fringe Festival has come and gone. The majority of this year’s 150 shows boasted more performances than shows in previous years, a move made by the Fringe staff to enable fest-goers to see more. Despite these efforts — which certainly helped — it was still impossible to see it all. But our critics tried. Here you’ll find a sampling of their experiences — good and positively horrendous — and learn what must-see performances you missed and those you’ll be thankful you bypassed.

—Fern Sternberg

Jails, Hospitals, & Hip-Hop Danny Hoch’s one-man show at the Painted Bride took youth culture as the universe (with its center in New York) and explored both the rage and the sweetness of guys victimized by violence, the doers and the done-to. Hoch transformed himself, with the change of a hat, from a rapper to a wannabe rapper being nagged by his mother to go to work to a millionaire rapper on Letterman. A terrific show, full of talent and energy and passionate politics, reveling in language, sizzling with style and soon (in February) to be released as a movie, already out as a book and a CD. Four shows — all sold out — clearly weren’t enough.

Bingo Bedlam A jolly 10 minutes about two couples, one broke, the other bragging about their exotic vacations. After bingo, brawl ensued. The trick was that the entire skit was written, by Colin Campbell, in words that start with "B" and delivered with speed and hilarity by Jen Childs, Pete Pryor, Tony Lawton and Bobbi Block (who also directed).

Tribal Belly Dance Undulations by Fleur Franscella, whose body is so flexible as to seem boneless.

Charting Course and Spaces Group Motion Company presented excerpts from their film/dance piece Spaces, choreographed by Manfred Fischbeck. The interaction between the video and the live dancers was often intriguing, with the best pieces being the jokey, elegant ones (like the telephonic tango, Phone Dance). Kristie Reddick, Heather Murphy and Peter D’Orsaneo shone.

Classics for Dummies A long, childish takeoff on Oedipus with audience participation (quick, the door!) that couldn’t even get the plot right and depended for humor on an accent supposedly from Uzebekistanislavski — the only bit of wit in the 45 minutes.

—Toby Zinman

	Providing a different viewpoint: Performance group Slant

Rank Stranger Assuming the personae of four desperate characters, Stanya Khan offered an often-humorous yet ultimately scathing socio-political commentary on contemporary America. Wildly physical and absolutely over the edge, yet if you listened closely to the stream-of-consciousness text you noted many recurring motifs.

Nichole Canuso, Bunhead’s Back and Cheap A strong dance show was provided by Nichole Canuso, who re-staged excerpts from a work titled13 Heads and 7 Tales, which debuted this past winter at the Community Education Center. At that time the work was rough around the edges, but Canuso has smoothed out the kinks; these excerpts were finely crafted exercises in the dynamics of dance structure. New York choreographer Jodi Sperling shared the bill. Her first piece, Bunhead’s Back, featured a ballerina with her head screwed on backwards, a humorous reflection on the extremes one needs to go though to become accomplished in this art form. The joke played well with the audience; however, the follow-up work, Cheap, a solo by Sperling intended to spoof acts of physical tricksterism, fell flat.

Patio Plastico Choreographed by Brian Sanders for a parking lot at Second and Vine. The cement plot was set up as an all-plastic backyard patio, complete with plastic sun hoisted up a flagpole. As synthetic music played (Esquivel, Art of Noise) 10 dancers romped through an inspired dance work that began with tap dancing in shoes made of soda bottles and ended with a raucous slip ’n’ slide number fueled by a power sprayer and capped by a delicate slow-dance duet. Patio Plastico drew crowds, not only from those who bought tickets, but also from passersby, many who appeared to stumble upon the show as they walked around Old City.

—Deni Kasrel

To Sirloin with Love: A Meat Opera No classic, but a pleasant enough way to spend 45 minutes. Can a vegan and a butcher find true love? OK, it wasn’t Sweeney Todd, but the comic-book sets, amateurish-but-enthusiastic performers, mediocre tunes and silly lyrics somehow combine pleasingly, and an engaging loopiness kept the whole thing afloat.

Anatomical Demonstrations A genuinely original idea. Scott Serrano created a 19th-century-style medical lecture in which the presenting dissectionist works on his own body. The intriguing notions of the play seem to be that the Victorian fascination with medical practice was steeped in displaced eroticism, and that contemporary audiences will find the rituals of self-mutilation both repellent and titillating. Serrano is writer and performer, and very much more successful as the former — the Demonstrations script is cleverly structured and full of quirky, provocative language, but it wants a more nuanced actor and stronger production values.

The Zen of Jock Itch The nagging male complaint becomes an occasion for self-reflection on topics including masturbation, same-sex dating, body hair and Louise Hay. This kind of personal comic reverie has become familiar territory in gay performance art, but Chris Gullo did it with great wit and aplomb — both as author and actor he was entirely winning, as was Tim Cusick, the supple (adult) sidekick who played Gullo as a boy. (The juxtapositions of the Fringe often bring revealing pairings, and Demonstrations and Jock Itch together could be seen as musings on the evolving nature of self-abuse.)

Day of Absence A revival of Douglas Turner Ward’s classic one-act in which all the black inhabitants of a reactionary Southern town disappear — and the white citizens who remain are embodied by black actors. Seen here in an unpolished but compelling production, one important question lingered: What does it mean when the black cast takes to playing — in whiteface — the white characters? Some actors are directed in a variation of traditional "blackface style" (the Mayor), while others more realistically parody certain white archetypes (a society matron). Still, the cast was charismatic (with particularly good work from Vaughan Dwight Morrison and Toni Barber), and the play, now 35 years old, remains sardonic and effective.

—David Anthony Fox

		Jock Itch’s zen master: Chris Gullo

Hi Everybody! About getting your expectations quashed and still living to greet a new day. Several story lines were spliced together in a relentless succession of songs, dances, lots of mime and skits. A woman gets her friends to attend one of those "grieving groups" only to find that grief can never be consoled. Three liquid-hipped gay men (parodies all) berate the audience about their lack of health insurance coverage. A boy-poet who has been rejected from society (why we do not know) lives out in the woods and recites his forlorn lyrics from atop an imaginary tree. A mother dies of a rare cancer for which, yet again, no health insurance coverage is available. Dancers step out of the moment of performance to complain that they are not warmed up enough to do the show. At the beginning, director Tere O’Connor himself emerged from the front row and academically labeled the show "poetic, absurdist theater of the opposite."

Aeroplane Man Rejection was one of the themes of the London-based hip-hop dancer/rapper Jonzi D’s stunningly well-crafted works at the Bride. In Aeroplane Man, Jonzi D stays in one spot right up near the audience and runs in place while telling the story of his travels from one country to the next. With the magical help of what he calls "Mr. Aeroplane Man," Jonzi D is imaginarily transported to Grenada only to find that his home-countrymen will not accept his expatriate status. Throughout all the rejection, Jonzi D’s body takes on the physical qualities of his imaginary environments. In the West Indies, with a subtle shift of music to Calypso, his steps are loose, low-down, his belly rolling like a reggae-mon. In NYC, his steps turn implosive, each muscular hip-hop pose more macho than the next. Keep on running, Jonzi D: The whole world needs your righteous artistry.

—Jonathan David Jackson

Duets One of the best dance performances of the Fringe was an outstanding collaboration between four current and former members of the Pennsylvania Ballet and four of their modern dance "pals." Duets, made up of five twosomes performed without intermission, enlisted eight of the best dancers in Philadelphia (Ballet: Christine Cox, Jeffrey Gribler, Amanda Miller and Anne White; "Pals": Hope Boykin, Katharine Livingston, Moncell London and Paul Struck). The dancers themselves choreographed most of the pieces; in addition, Myra Bazell created one, and she and Monica Favand made another. I especially wish to remark on the lighting — uncredited and therefore presumably the work of the choreographers — which contributed immensely to the power of the three dances that were not performed with the lights on. All five, which ran the gamut from lighthearted to sensual to psychologically probing, received splendid performances.

B-Sides and Remixes Less original and therefore a respectable next step down from Duets for me was the program put on by Philadelphia stalwarts Headlong. The company offered mainly work from the last five years, which permitted me to see a few early pieces I had missed. Nothing wrong with that, when the quality was as high as it was here. The three principals of Headlong (David Brick, Andrew Simonet, and Amy Smith) share a rare gift — a knowledge of how much is enough and when and how to stop, which is why the work was crisp and amusing.

Doug Elkins Dance Company A disappointment was the much-heralded Doug Elkins, who received the first commission ever from the Fringe. Elkins’ In Winter, Stand (1999) was fast-moving modern ballet, marked by a lot of fresh partnering. Train to Philly (the premiere) and Narcoleptic Lovers (1995), however, demonstrated that Elkins’ movement vocabulary, in fact, is quite limited. What was fresh in In Winter, Stand quickly grew stale as we saw its moves repeated again and again. Furthermore, his recycling of hip-hop was insipid. Elkins needs an informed and sympathetic "dance dramaturg" to assist him in editing his work ruthlessly.

—Robert Ackerman

Words, Words, Words In the beginning there was the word. And the word during the Fringe moved fast and furious. Faster than dancing feet and caustic thoughts could ever move. Sometimes this clattering chattering took place via alien life forms playing surf-punk rock as it did in Slant’s Squeal Like A Pig. In this Plan 9 meets Tokyo Rocks escapade, three dancer/singers — a sort of Martian-Monkees — talked about dreams of media-darlingness and reduced themselves to slaves and waiters. The language was pure speedy American pulp fiction, fried linguistics from advertising, religion and bad novels.

Flesh Peddler Productions’ mock-trio of casting directors took you interactively into the cold confines of the commercial hiring process. Avant art-minded Milos Iszorgein, commerce-minded Seymour Merton and nervous wreck Anita Braike endlessly blathered on over videotapes and live auditions. As the trio frantically climbed all over each others’ words and embarrassed their charges, video-faces froze in mid-scowl, pleading to have the pleasure of saying "The Fringe ate my raisins."

Reigning hip-hop queen Ursula Rucker, her DJ/poet Rob Yancey III, white boy rapping trio Shrine and soul chanteuse Vicki Miles — during Rucker’s Future Shock at the Painted Bride — made sure the audience knew that "hip-hop is everything," a universal province of black and white America. What really was everything was the hyperactivity of learned, funny, furious, self-empowered language, castigating racism and anti-feminist sentiment. Rucker moved from the dashiki-wearing characters of her last Bride performance to sleek chic leather ’n’ pumps, representing powerful ’round-the-way girls dissing dick-holding money men.

For all the quick words, two of my favorite pieces — equally as funny and as fraught with meaning and whimsy — were practically wordless. New Paradise Laboratories’ Stupor, set to a scarred-electronica meets somber-blues-and-Sinatra soundtrack, told more of a film noir tale, with its horrific glances and athletic mod-ballet, than a million words could do. And Mauri Walton’s frozen dance and silent filmic Vertigo Planes was, as always, a delicate delight.

—a.d. amorosi